In folklore, the famous "Swallow Li San" can be described as a household name. At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic of China, there appeared in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region a famous rogue Li Hong (whose real name is no longer available, there is a saying called Li Jinghua), who was proficient in fist and foot kung fu, often robbed the rich and the poor, and was everywhere hostile to corrupt officials and bullies, and was wanted by the Beiyang government at that time. Later, the military police managed to bribe his apprentices, set traps to arrest and kill them (one said to have died in prison due to a tuberculosis attack caused by long-term opium use). Because of his many heroic deeds during his lifetime, many people thanked him for his kindness and righteousness and collected his body and buried it in the western suburbs of Beijing. This person is recognized by the academic community as "Swallow Li San", and there are also "Swallow Li San" Li Fen in Jixian County, Tianjin, and Li Yunlong, "Swallow Li San" in Cangzhou, Hebei Province, all of whom have the name of "rogue thieves" who rob the rich and help the poor. Although they are all thieves in essence, there are still many people in the folk who have a positive evaluation of the "swallow Li San" represented by them.
"Swallow Li San" arrested in film and television works
However, some jianghu thieves and snitches who can do light work and happen to have the surname Li but have ulterior motives have also set their sights on the name of "Swallow Li San" and played this sign as a villain. One of the most famous guys even claimed that the Japanese and the Kuomintang could not do anything about him. He was strong in martial arts, and after liberation, he dared to commit murder, and even shot the police with guns to resist arrest, but in the end he was planted in the hands of the people's public security and got his due fate. This fake "Swallow Li San" is the protagonist of this article - Li Shengwu of Lizhuang Village in Yucheng, Shandong Province.
Li Shengwu (photographed after being captured by the Jinan Municipal Public Security Bureau)
Li Shengwu was born in 1921, and his family in the countryside of Shandong at that time could be called a well-off level, with more than 20 acres of land and more than 10 tile houses. However, Li Shengwu's father did not do his job, saw that the opium trafficking was very profitable, and also started a drug trafficking business, and soon became contaminated with various vices such as "eating, drinking, gambling and smoking", and the family's wealth was soon broken. By 1927, the Li family was already in debt, and the creditors frequently came to the door to force debts, and the whole family had to leave their hometown and go north to the Kanto.
An art work depicting a scene in the Kanto Region
After arriving in the northeast, the situation of the Li family had just improved, and unfortunately, one after another, First Li Shengwu's brother fell to his death while building a house for others, and then his mother died of illness, and repeated sufferings caused the Li family to be destroyed, and Li Shengwu soon became an unsupervised child. At this time, the Japanese imperialists launched the September 18 Incident, and the whole territory of northeast China soon fell. After several years as a slave to the state, in 1936 Father Li had to take Li Shengwu back to his hometown in Guannei again. However, at this time, under the pressure of the Japanese invaders, the economic situation in Kannai was just as bad. Li Shengwu had to sign up as a laborer in the winter of that year and board a stuffy tanker truck heading northeast. But Li Shengwu took advantage of his familiar environment to wait for an opportunity to escape, and when the train arrived in Harbin, he successfully jumped out of the window to escape while the guards were not ready. After escaping, Li Shengwu found the son of his neighbor's family when he followed his parents into the Kanto, and the two of them agreed to go to learn martial arts together, so the two went to Songhua Jiangbei together and threw themselves into a martial arts master named Liu Hongji to learn martial arts.
An old photograph of an old martial artist, Li Shengwu's master is a martial artist
While learning martial arts, Li Shengwu also followed some "gentlemen on Liang" to steal a lot of stealing techniques. After completing his studies, Liu Hongji also specially instructed the disciples who "went down the mountain": "We who practice martial arts should put chivalry first, and we must rob the rich and help the poor." ”
In the beginning, Li Shengwu and his brothers did obey the orders of the division, mainly stealing the assets and shops of the Japanese or traitors. At the end of 1939, one of his brothers was captured by the Japanese police for robbing a Japanese gold shop, and confessed under torture that Li Shengwu was an accomplice, and then the puppet Manchu authorities immediately wanted Li Shengwu. Seeing that things were not good, Li Shengwu immediately fled back to Guannei, and then returned to his hometown in Yucheng, Shandong.
After Li Shengwu returned to his hometown, he once wanted to wash his hands and not dry, and with a little Japanese language and skills he learned in the northeast, he mixed in with the Japanese company in Jinan as a repairman. But he could not stand the brutal "management" and oppression of the Japanese. So in 1941, he "returned to his old business", in order to give himself a strong "momentum", he pretended to be the name of the previous rogue swallow Li San, and also called himself "Swallow Li San", bragging everywhere that he "flew on the wall like walking on the ground" to expand his influence on the rivers and lakes, and soon became a famous snitch on the underworld.
In the period from 1941 to 1945 before Japan's surrender, Li Shengwu successively robbed Jinan's "Grand Duke" entrusted trading house, "Hongshun" foreign clothing store, "Meizhi" clock watch shop, "Huacheng" silk satin zhuang and other merchants, and obtained a large amount of stolen money and stolen goods. He soon became as addicted to the vices of eating, drinking and gambling as his father, and although the amount of money he received was huge, he squandered it. Although the authorities have organized many pursuits, they have not succeeded, which in turn has further added a mysterious color to Li Shengwu, and his fame in the "Dao" has become more and more large.
After Japan's surrender, Li Shengwu did not relent, but intensified his misdeeds. In the spring of 1946, Li Shengwu was wounded twice with a gun while robbing in Jinan, which caused a great shock in society, and under the strong pressure of public opinion, the Kuomintang military and police in Jinan had to invest a lot of manpower to hunt down Li Shengwu. He was arrested in the fall of that year and sentenced to death by a court, but he used his stolen property to bribe Kuomintang military and police officials, delaying the execution. Even during his detention, he could eat and drink in prison and even prostitutes in prison cells.
In the second half of 1948, with the reversal of the situation in the War of Liberation, the East China Field Army was about to launch a general offensive against Jinan, where the Kuomintang army was entrenched. At the time when the building was about to fall, the agents of the Kuomintang's so-called "Second Appeasement District Headquarters" went so far as to say that "this person has martial arts and will be useful in the future." He had the vicious idea of leaving this person to "return to the mountains" before the liberation of Jinan and let him endanger the new society.
On September 16, 1948, our Shandong Corps launched the Jinan Campaign under the command of Commander Xu Shiyou. As the fighting broke out on the periphery, the Kuomintang military and police personnel in the prison scattered, and Li Shengwu saw the opportunity and successfully escaped from prison with other prisoners. On the way to escape, he happened to encounter the shangbu defenders who were defeated by the onslaught of our army, and the guns and ammunition were lost everywhere, and Li Shengwu took the opportunity to retrieve a horse-branded pick-up (American-made Colt 1903) pistol and 5 rounds of ammunition from a corpse.
The Colt 1903 pistol, nicknamed "Horse Picker"
After the liberation of Jinan, Li Shengwu was honest for a few days and "returned to his old business" again because he had no money at hand. At about 23:00 on the evening of December 16, 1948, he climbed up from the wall in the backyard of the "Qingzi" gold shop with a pistol, and then hid on the roof to observe the situation inside the store. At 2 a.m., he saw that the people in the store were asleep, so he sneaked into the room from the roof. However, an old man on duty in the shop noticed that there was a movement, immediately shouted at people, and slammed Li Shengwu on the head with a stick, and Li Shengwu was furious and immediately shot the old man with a pistol and killed him. Then Li Shengwu rushed into the North House with a gun, forced a clerk to take the key to open the safe, and stole all kinds of gold jewelry 3 or more than 500,000 yuan of Beihai tickets (currency issued by the "Beihai Bank" in the Liberated Area of East China), and the robbery continued until 5 a.m. Li Shengwu was satisfied to escape through the back door.
One set of North Sea tickets
Only 2 weeks later, that is, on December 30, Li Shengwu once again robbed the "Lao Fengxiang" gold shop with a gun, he not only snatched 24 gold yuan and 14.7 million yuan of Beihai tickets, but also shot and killed the father of the store manager; in the early spring of 1949, Wang Mou, a famous big boss in Jinan City, was shot and killed by Li Shengwu in his apartment, and Li Shengwu also arrogantly wrote the words "The murderer is me" on the wall with the blood of the deceased after committing the crime, which shook the city of Jinan.
Subsequently, one after another, the boss of Jinan's industrial and commercial industry was killed, and the robbery and murder of his home were robbed, which made Quancheng panic for a while, and the grass and trees were soldiers, and also put the newly established Jinan Municipal People's Government and the Jinan Municipal Military Control Commission under great pressure of public opinion. Guo Zihua, then mayor of Jinan Special City, ordered Li Shiying, then director of the Jinan Special City Public Security Bureau, to solve the case as soon as possible, and Luo Ruiqing, who was preparing to build the Ministry of Public Security, also sent a strict order to reprimand the Jinan Municipal Public Security Bureau for failing to handle the case (in the telephone, Li Shiying was forced to be reprimanded by "Luo Changzi" for ten minutes). Under extreme pressure, Li Shiying boldly used Duanmu Hongyu, then 22, head of the reconnaissance team of the Jinan Municipal Public Security Bureau's criminal police team, to grasp the case.
Guo Zihua
Li Shiying
Duanmu Hongyu in his later years
Based on the investigation of the scene and the visit to the masses, as well as the introduction of jinan underworld figures through the old police who were retained, coupled with the results of Duanmu Hongyu personally taking 2 investigators to make up and reconnoitry, the public security organs finally determined that this series of gun murder and robbery cases were all committed by Li Shengwu. As for Li Shengwu, as long as the comrades who have built an underground traffic station in Jinan are deeply resentful of him, because he has stolen money and materials from the traffic station more than once, and has also injured the traffic station personnel. Therefore, for our party, this person also has a blood debt on his hands, so the Jinan Municipal Public Security Bureau immediately began to deploy the operation to arrest Li Shengwu.
The time soon came to January 6, 1949, that morning, Xu Zhigang, a reconnaissance officer of the Nanguan Reconnaissance Group of the Municipal Public Security Bureau, received a report from the masses that he had seen Li Shengwu in a carpenter shop on Shunjing Street, and that he did not act hastily, but first launched a peripheral investigation, starting from the carpenter's shop, and as a result, Shunten found that Li Shengwu had opened a "Yuanshun Oil and Grain Stack" in Shunjing Street in Nanguan with stolen money. Xu Zhigang immediately reported to Duanmu Hongyu, so Duanmu Hongyu reported to Li Shiying for approval to transfer another 3 scouts and 1 person who knew Li Shengwu to form a special case team headed by Duanmu, with Xu Zhigang leading the team to arrest this Jiangyang thief.
On January 15, when the scouts were stalking outside the oil and grain stack, they found Li Shengwu coming from the south, and when he entered the store, the people in contact greeted Li Shengwu in the front room: "We are from the Public Security Bureau, please come to the bureau to talk." Li Shengwu agreed with a full mouth, very cooperative, and his attitude confused the scouts, so he did not search him and did not wear equipment for him. When several scouts led Li Shengwu to the alleyway, a team of gongs, drums, and songs celebrating the Spring Festival came in front of them, and there were many people on the side of the road.
Old photo, a song team in a certain place during the Spring Festival in the late 40s
Taking advantage of the crowd's congestion and chaos, Li Shengwu suddenly squatted down and shrank again, getting rid of the 2 scouts behind him, and then he jumped on the mound in a collapsed room. A scout immediately raised his gun and fired, but the pistol jammed and did not fire. At this time, Li Shengwu had already pulled out a pistol hidden in the armpit of the cotton coat and shot at the 4 scouts, the sound of gunfire alarmed the crowd on the street, people scattered and fled, the scouts did not dare to shoot for fear of accidentally injuring the masses, Li Shengwu took advantage of the chaos to escape.
Li Shengwu escaped like a frightened bird and never dared to stay in Jinan any longer, so he fled to Xuzhou. In the local area, he once earned more than 30 million yuan of Beihai tickets by doing legal business, and he could have washed his hands and done it again. But in the end, he still wanted to make "quick money", do a big job, and make up for all the previous losses. In February, Li Shengwu bought a "Canadian pistol" (Browning GP35 pistol) and 24 rounds of ammunition on the black market through former inmates.
Some versions of the Browning High Power pistol imported from Canada by old China have a Canadian-made inscription engraved on the sleeve, hence the name "Canadian Pistol"
On March 1, 1949, Li Shengwu robbed the "Tianbaoxing" silver building at No. 19 Zhongzheng Road in Xuzhou; on April 20, he again robbed the silver building of Fangjiu "Xiatianji" at No. 202 Zhongzheng Road; on May 17, he robbed the "Lao Qingyun" silver building with a gun, robbing a large amount of gold and cash.
During Li Shengwu's consecutive crimes in Xuzhou, the reconnaissance team of the criminal police team of the Jinan Municipal Public Security Bureau headed by Duanmu Hongyu has already started from his social relations and launched a large-scale mapping work. Through investigation, public security officers identified a black gun dealer named Gu Shengsan, who was close to Li Shengwu, and arrested him. During the interrogation, Gu Shengsan admitted that he had previously been an officer in Chiang Kai-shek's army, but now he was trading and trafficking in materials, while secretly selling black guns and having a friendship with Li Shengwu. Gu confessed that he had fled to Xuzhou in recent months as Jinan public security organs stepped up their pursuit of Li Shengwu. Li Shengwu had previously asked Gu Shengsan to help him sell the stolen goods, and in order to get the money back, he was in a hurry, and the money in Gu Shengwu's hand at this time had all been bought into freight to Xuzhou. So Li Shengwu dropped harsh words and asked Gu Shengsan to repay the money as soon as possible, otherwise he would be "not polite" to him. According to the analysis of the specific situation, the public security organs held that although Gu Shengsan had historical problems, selling black guns also violated the law; his attitude was relatively honest, he explained many problems, and expressed his willingness to actively assist in solving the case and atone for his crimes. At the same time, starting from his selfish intentions, Li Shengwu was fierce and poisonous, posing a threat to Gu Shengsan, and he was afraid that he would not be able to give Money to Li Shengwu and be retaliated against, so he could use the contradictions between these two people for my use.
Duanmu Hongyu's plan was to first release Gu Shengsan as an "undercover" and let him follow the task force to Xuzhou to find Li Shengwu dai for meritorious service. However, before this plan could be implemented, he was transferred to Shanghai with a paper transfer order, following Li Shiying to take over the police work of The Shanghai Municipality that was about to be liberated, and the task of arresting Li Shengwu could only be continued by the successive comrades.
On May 19, 1949, the successor task force took Gu Shengsan to Xuzhou. Gu Shengsan then found the contact person specified by Li Shengwu and told him that he had brought the money to return Mr. Li. However, the contact told Gu that Li Shengwu had not returned from a trip to the field for the time being, and would not return until mid-June. The task force waited until June 14 before Gu Shengsan reported that Li Shengwu had returned to Xuzhou, but had not yet met. Just left a letter to the contact to say that he went to Tai'an, and returned to Xuzhou on the 19th.
By June 19, Li Shengwu still did not show up, and the task force was worried that this cunning guy would not feel dangerous, so he temporarily withdrew to Jinan and monitored Gu Shengsan's family.
On June 21, Gu Shengsan received a letter from Li Shengwu, in which he blamed gu for leaving Xuzhou without waiting for him. Judging from this, the special case team believed that Li Shengwu must still be in Xuzhou, so he immediately went to Xuzhou for the second time. On June 23, Gu Shengsan and one of our insiders saw Li Shengwu passing by by by a boat by the river. The two sides said hello and agreed that Gu would bring the money to Li's residence the next day, No. 78 Tieguan Lane, Xuzhou.
Considering that Li Shengwu was treacherous and abnormal, the special case team usually had three cunning rabbits and three caves, and his whereabouts were mysterious, and he never easily revealed his residence. In order to confirm whether what he said was true, the special case team asked Gu Shengsan to come to the door around eight o'clock in the morning of the next day. Gu Guoran saw Li Shengwu living there. So he left the money on his body and made an appointment to send the rest of the money tomorrow.
The next day, with the cooperation of the Xuzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau, the special case group first arranged an armed plainclothes blockade outside Li Shengwu's residence, and then led by the household registration police of the police station, under the guise of checking the household registration, entered the courtyard where Li Shengwu lived, and in order not to arouse his vigilance, deliberately inquired into other households in turn.
Newspapers reported li shengwu's arrest that year
On June 27, the task force escorted Li Shengwu back to Jinan (to prevent him from escaping, he was specially tied to a door panel and tied into rice dumplings). Subsequently, the Jinan Municipal Public Security Bureau immediately organized elite personnel to interrogate Li Shengwu, and he confessed to a series of crimes of murder and robbery with guns committed by himself in Jinan and Xuzhou.
On September 4, 1949, the Jinan Municipal Public Security Bureau closed Li Shengwu's case and reported it to the Shandong Provincial Government and the Ministry of Public Security and recommended that he be sentenced to death (at that time, neither the Supreme People's Court nor the Supreme People's Procuratorate was established, so the litigation, trial and judgment of the case were the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Security and the provincial governments of each province). On September 30, the Shandong provincial government issued a directive: "Agree to sentence the habitual bandit Li Shengwu to capital punishment." At 6:30 a.m. on October 27, 1949, public security officers escorted Li Shengwu, then 29 years old, to the Execution Ground outside North Kazi on 12th Road for execution.
In his career of more than 10 years of banditry, Li Shengwu, a crime-ridden thief in Jiangyang, did not have the opportunity to wash his hands and go ashore and become a man again, but he accumulated a lot of money and was accustomed to this kind of "business" of quick money, and he could no longer return to the era of engaging in manual labor to earn money and support his family, so every time he chose to return to his old business, and eventually fell deeper and deeper in the mire, until all disasters were gone.
In 1997, the portrayal of the negative protagonist "Li Yunlong" (played by Zhang Li) in the martial arts TV series "Swallow Li San" directed by Wang Xinmin is largely based on Li Shengwu's actions (as a villain, he seriously robbed a number of positive protagonists in the play).
Poster of the TV series "Swallow Li San"